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Alicorn comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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Oh, the blogger is probably male. But from eir perspective, so was I: I blogged about "refining the art of human rationality" and ey could have been ever-so-responsibly screening off priors and making eir best guess and ey was wrong and I am pissed off. So, I decline to do the same thing.
Meanwhile I find 'ey' just irritating so my approach is to sometimes just avoid pronouns while other times I randomly generate pronouns based on my prediction, biased towards 0.5. I don't recall being dramatically mistaken thus far and seem to have a reasonably good track record for guessing right based on writing style. At least, that is, in cases where I get later confirmation.
The singular they has a long and illustrious history. I know I've said it four or five times in the recent comments, but that's what I'd recommend.
Really? I use 'they' quire frequenly but feel bad every time. I'll stop feeling bad now. Thanks. ;)
Glad to be of service!
I'm sorry you find "ey" irritating; I promise not to refer to you a la Spivak. And I'm glad you're good at detecting gender from writing style. And someday you may piss someone off very badly.
It doesn't appear to have occurred to you that some people find Spivak pronouns very annoying. They annoy me immensely because it feels like someone is deliberately obstructing my reading in an uncomfortable way to make some kind of political point almost entirely unrelated to the context of the post itself. I usually just stop reading and go elsewhere to calm down.
I promise not to refer to you with Spivak pronouns either.
"I don't know what gender the person I'm talking about is and wouldn't care to get it wrong" is not a political point, though.
It's not me being referred to with them that bothers me, it is them being used at all. I find it difficult and uncomfortable to read, like trying to read 1337 5p34k, and it breaks my reading flow in an unpleasant way. It's like bad grammar or spelling but with the additional knowledge that someone is doing it deliberately for reasons that I consider political.
"Political"?
I think it may have been a few decades ago, when the pronouns were invented, but at this point Spivak is generally used for courtesy purposes, as Alicorn said.
Breaking the flow I'll agree is a valid objection, however. I have opted to avoid neologistic pronouns for that reason, save in cases where such are requested. If someone wants to be a "xe", that's their business, I say.
Thanks for the detailed description of why you find invented pronouns annoying.
I'm pretty flexible about new words, so I react to invented pronouns as a minor novelty.
I don't know what people who use invented pronouns have in mind-- they could be intending to tweak people, or they could be more like me and generalizing from one example.
I trained myself to use Spivak pronouns in less than a month. As far as lingual/grammatical conventions go, they flow very naturally. Singular "they" does not, because a plural verb does not belong with a singular subject. I find that much more annoying.
Dost thou also find the use of "singular you" annoying?
There is a difference between those situations. "You" is the only modern second person singular pronoun, whereas the third person singular has "he" and "she" in addition to the oft-used "they," the latter obviously being the one which doesn't fit.
Personally, I do feel it would be better to have some separation among the singular and plural second person pronouns, to avoid awkward constructions like "you all" and similar things. However, "thou" doesn't seem to be a very viable option, given its current formal, Biblical connotations.
Also, the English language is missing a possessive form of the pronoun "which" (compare "who" and "whose"), if anyone wants to work on that problem.
One really clumsy thing in English is that there is no interrogative pronoun to which the answer would be an ordinal number (i.e. N-th in some sequential order). There isn't even a convenient way to ask that question.
Don't we use "whose" for that purpose?
That is the suggested remedy, but it's a bit of a kludge. "Who" is intended to be used as a pronoun for people, so the possessive form "whose" should be used in the same way.
I'm a bit confused that you call it just a "suggested remedy"; my point is not that anyone advises this, it's that this is what English speakers actually do.
Intended by who? Should why? It's not even clear offhand that we should regard "whose" as exclusively a possessive form of "who", given the above.
You're not the only person I know to make this claim, but I will admit to never having understood it.
That is, I can understand objecting to "If my neighbor visits I'll give them a cookie" because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity -- singular "neighbor" doesn't go with plural "them." I don't have a problem with that, myself, but I accept that some people do.
And I can understand endorsing "If my neighbor visits I'll give em a cookie" despite it violating the English grammatical convention that "em" isn't a pronoun. I don't have a problem with that either.
But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I'm willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don't see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.
Mostly, when people say this sort of thing I understand it to be an aesthetic judgment, on a par with not liking the color blue. Which is fine, as long as they aren't too obnoxious about trying to impose their aesthetic judgments on me.
Presumably you mean pronoun and antecedent. Clearly, subject and object need not agree in number (what you call "quantity"); such a requirement would in fact be logically impossible.
Yup, you're right. I have absolutely no idea what my brain thought it was doing there. <hides face in shame>
Entirely incidentally: requiring that the subject and object match in number would admittedly be a strange sort of grammatical requirement to have, as it would preclude expressing all manner of useful thoughts (e.g., "Give me two slices of pizza"), and I'd be incredulous if an actual language claimed to have such a requirement, but I'm not sure it's logically impossible.
You're right, of course. In fact, one could conceive of a language where the grammatical number of the object would have to agree with the subject, and it would therefore not give any information about the actual number of things denoted by the object, which would have to be stated explicitly if it's necessary to avoid ambiguity, like in languages that lack grammatical number altogether. For all I know, there might even be an actual human language somewhere that features something like this.
I don't consider the creation of words to fall under the auspices of grammar. That happens in English and other languages all the time, because new or different concepts frequently need to be expressed in ways that are unavailable in the current state of the language. Using new words promotes clarity, in the long term, but misusing current words does the opposite.
"The pronoun form 'they' is anaphorically linked in the discourse to 'this person'. Such use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is "wrong" simply haven't done their literary homework and don't deserve our attention." (Language Log)
(Examples)
Language Log and Strunk and White are not playing the same game.
Strunk and White are playing "Does this look right nowadays?"
Language Log apparently thinks there are official rules determined by history.
I, of course, think the singular "they" looks just fine, nowadays.
This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don't follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in (I'm not sure if this applies in the specific case of Strunk and White and singular they, but it applies in many cases of what's labeled prescriptivist poppycock there) are made even more absurd by history and the usage of high status people praised for their style.
Exactly so. My favorite example is Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," in which he rails against (among other things) the passive voice, but the very opening sentence of the essay contains the phrase "it is generally assumed." Mistakes were made, I guess...
This is unfair to Orwell. Orwell's advice is not to never use the passive voice. To begin, Orwell gives examples of bad writing and says:
His obvious complaint is that the passive voice is overused and inappropriately used, not that it is used at all. Note the phrase "wherever possible". That suggests that the problem he is identifying is one of excess. In obvious reaction to this, he suggests a rule which exactly flips the above description, specifically:
This however does not say "never use the passive, ever". And it should furthermore be obvious that Orwell does not mean, "never use the passive where you can find some convoluted and unreadable way to use the active." I should think that you could always find some convoluted way to use the active. Rather, I think it should be obvious that he means, "never use the passive where you can use the active well." What it amounts to is a reminder to the writer to re-examine his passives to see whether an active would not be better.
To expand on this point - Strunk & White and Language Log are both playing the "does this look right nowadays" game; the difference is that LL is basing their conclusions on what people actually do nowadays, whereas S&W are simply stating what they think would work better with no actual testing. That they failed to actually follow it suggests that in actual usage they did not find it to work better.
The reference to historical authors (rather than the current ones that would be more relevant) is just a bit of Dark Arts by LL, because the people espousing such arbitrary rules often claim they are based on history.
Is it Dark Arts to head off at the pass the feeling that a grammatical rule is upholding 'proper, traditional' English against 'slipping standards'?
They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they "don't deserve our attention". White (of Strunk and White) is the author of Charlotte's Web, still popular after six decades, so, not quite a literary failure.
Sure. Also, if they are driving a car into an intersection I'm crossing, I definitely endorse attending to them. But I suspect the poster Morendil is quoting meant "don't deserve our attention [as authorities on grammatical usage]."
The pervasive wrongness of Strunk and White, in particular, is a recurring theme on LanguageLog.
If we're to be treating people as deserving of our attention on the basis of their literary success, as the author of the quote did (see the appeal to Chaucer et al.), then it becomes relevant that E. B. White wrote Charlotte's web. If we are going to ignore what E. B. White says on matters of usage because it doesn't matter what he did as a writer, then in order to be fully consistent we should ignore Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the rest. This, however, undermines the Language Log quote, because it relies entirely on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the others to make its point.
You seem to be failing to draw the distinction between looking at what they said and looking at what they did. And indeed, Strunk and White did not, in fact, actually follow their own advice.
I don't think it's straightforwardly literary success. Chaucer and Shakespeare may be the two most influential writers in English. Their work represents the form of English that 'won' in the 14th century and turn of 1600 respectively. The only other texts that leap to mind as historical sources of similar importance would be the King James Bible and the first Dictionary.
Shakespeare and Chaucer aren't being appealed to as authoritative commentators. Their writing is referred to of evidence of English as it did and does exist.
Singular they may be less distracting than Spivak, much as I like the latter.
I use singular "they" sometimes, although I find it makes many sentences awkward, especially if I'm also talking about some plural items or persons.
Fair enough - I only mentioned it because I happened to have a period where I avoided singular-they because I thought it was forbidden. I'll trust your judgement on style.